yh2

Creating the offices of the weekly cultural tabloid Voir was an integrated project: all the paper’s departments are on a single floor in a downtown office building. There are three basic elements to the architectural design:

• In the centre, in keeping with the structural grid of the building, is a huge, enclosed box-like space containing the reception area and support services. This is the heart of the paper. The rectangular hall is seen as a newspaper page, and the outside of the box is like a huge bulletin board for posting cultural events, reminiscent of the plywood walls erected around construction sites.
• Traffic circulates around the central core, providing access to the meeting rooms: the singular, white, prow-like pointes blanches.
• The various editorial and production departments occupies the rest of the floor, off-axis to the building’s structural grid. The way that the two grids interact creates views of the city and a multitude of specific spaces, which personalizes each department, each pointes blanches and each work station.

Offices are open-plan and the urban panorama is available to all. The architectural elements are expressed in their unrefined state: this is the architecture of accidental encounter, dynamic and burst open, rough yet fluid, like the city from which the project and the paper itself emerged.

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Finalist, Institute of Design Montréal Award
Interior Design
Institute of Design Montréal, 2001

Special Mention, Prize of Excellence
commercial architecture category
Ordre des architectes du Québec, 2000

Area

20 000 sq.ft.

Design team

yh2
Paul Bernier
Marie-Claude Hamelin
Loukas Yiacouvakis 

Construction team

Pictures credits

Johanne Biffi / Benoît Aquin

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